The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Satellite television is increasing in popularity due to the ever-increasing amount of programming as well as the quality of programming. Programming includes standard national (CONUS) broadcasts, local or regional station broadcasts, on-demand content and interactive content. Interactive content is increasing in popularity.
Satellite television broadcast systems typically use several satellites. Each satellite has several transponders that receive signals from the ground and broadcast the signals to users. Each transponder is capable of providing a certain amount of content therethrough. That is, each transponder may provide a certain bit rate therethrough.
As the channels change from different levels or quality of content, such as high definition versus standard definition, the bit rates may change. Also, satellite programming provides occasional programming or channels that are not constantly broadcast. Pay-per-view content, sporting events and interactive television are examples of occasional content that is provided. Because of the constant changing of content, various channels may not be broadcast for an amount of time.
Providing customers with enhanced content may be desirable. For example, providing customers with movie trailers for a future available film through an on-demand system or a pay-per-view system may be desirable. Movie trailers may be provided as push and carousel content. Push and carousel content is content that is provided to a user device prior to a request from the user device. Push and carousel content may also include welcome videos or how-to videos for fixing or troubleshooting various consumer issues. Push and carousel content may be scheduled into channels that may be otherwise not used due to the fluctuation and content. Currently a spreadsheet is used to determine where and when to place content to be broadcasted to consumer devices. Using a spreadsheet introduces human error into the allocation system. Also, the process of manually scheduling each push and carousel content is time-consuming. Each of these elements increases the cost of the system.
In addition, movies and other content may be provided as carousel content. Carousel content is content that has a repeating schedule, interleaved with other content. Similar to push and carousel content, carousel content may also be scheduled into channels that may be otherwise not used due to the fluctuation and content. In this case, the scheduling may make more efficient use of the channel bandwidth by maximizing the number of movie titles broadcast onto the channels while still allowing the user device sufficient opportunities to record the content in a timely manner. The user device may request a particular content to be stored in memory based on the user's request. In this case, when the content is broadcast, the user device will then store the content in memory to support later viewing. The user expectation is typically that the requested content will be successfully stored into memory, with a particular success rate (for example, 95% of the time), but the user does not know the exact time the content will be stored into memory.
Once the push or carousel content is communicated to the consumer devices, it may be stored in memory for a future time until the user selects the content.